Jinkun Zhu works across installation, sculpture, video, and sound. His practice focuses on the sprawling networked society and the endlessly valorized images circulating within it, as well as the ways rumors, commodities, and technological discourse are distributed and consumed. Through fictional narratives, brand-building, and meme-like scenography, he responds to and subverts the grotesque realities shaped by the aura of technology. Drawing from news fragments, internet memes, commercial imagery, and technological imaginaries, Zhu extracts materials from mass audiovisual templates and reworks, collages, and repackages them into hyperreal environments suspended between hardware and software, advertisement and exhibition.
In this exhibition, Zhu reassembles images, objects, and narratives from severalof his previous series into a temporary space resembling a trade fair booth. Signs,packaging, screens, posters, and display structures together form an oversaturatedenvironment, like a provisional marketplace for future technologies, digital assets,and commercial mythologies. The fictional branded shipping boxes are drawnfrom the Scenery Supplier series, while the Al-generated soap opera and movieposter lightboxes come from the World Web Wrapper series. Symbols within thevideo installation recall the imaginaries produced by technology platforms and thecrypto economy around 2022. The neon sign VIBE3.0 parodies WEB3.0, pointing toa condition of reality increasingly driven by mood and affect.
These elements carry the rough, cheap visual quality of an almost low-gradecommercial booth, endlessly copied, circulated, and repackaged like onlineimages. On the surface, the work presents an accessible, entertaining, evenabsurdly overstimulated spectacle; underneath lies a deeper system of collectiveimagination and desire that can no longer be grasped through concretecommodities alone. This atmosphere- and image-driven mode of productionitself becomes a parody of meme culture, platform aesthetics, and mechanisms ofimage circulation, pointing to how sensory experience in the post-internet era iscontinually reformatted and shaped.
